The Federal Republic of Germany like the United States, once guaranteed freedom of speech. According to the official translation of Germany’s constitution, its Basic Law (Das Grundgesetz):

Article 5

[Freedom of expression, arts and sciences]

(1)

Every person shall have the right freely to express and dis-

seminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and

to inform himself without hindrance from generally acces-

sible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of report-

ing by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed.

There shall be no censorship

That ain’t so no more. Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have made executive changes to Germany’s basic law. According to the Washington Post of January 7, 2016, “…prosecutors are launching investigations into inflammatory comments as judges dole out fines, even probation time, to the worst offenders.” Then, the Post continued, “German authorities, meanwhile, have reached a deal with Facebook, Google, and Twitter to get tougher on offensive content, with the outlets agreeing to apply domestic laws, rather than their own corporate policies, to review of posts.” The paper omitted just how and who would be “reviewing” the posts. The companies themselves? Or the German federal and State security services? Or, both?

And the terrible crimes under investigation and the punishments doled out? The Washington, D.C. paper noted that the German state had fined a man €300 and sentenced him to five months’ probation for daring to post on his Facebook page that refugees should “burn alive” or “drown” in the sea. A Berlin woman also got five months’ probation for posting remarks on her Facebook page about asylum seekers raping a German woman. She called the rapists “Filth” and pressed for stronger measures against the migrants, writing that if this is not done, “more asylum seekers’ homes will burn”. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported the most extreme case: a Bavarian court sentenced a man to 27 months’ imprisonment for posting a suggestion that Chancellor Merkel and her helpers be stood up against a wall and shot for betraying the German people [i.e., supporting unrestricted immigration].

What’s behind this attack on freedom?

The answer is the flood of alleged asylum seekers driven out of the Middle East by American. Gulf States, Israeli, Saudi, Turkish actions. To which we can now add German, French, and British efforts. And it was Angela Merkel who invited the million-man march into Europe. (See: Hausfrauleaks, January 1, 2016; Global Research Canada December 7, 2015). (Some, such as CNN, link her and her family to the old East German security service, the Stasi. Merkel’s codename was said to be Erika.)

Initially, the Migration of Peoples caused what appeared to be minor culture clashes: defecation in the streets, brawls with drunken Oktoberfest-goers, and conservative Muslim outrage against revealingly-clad (to them) German teenagers.

Say it ain’t so, Joe.

On New Year’s Eve 2015, things changed drastically. Once, just a few years ago, the event, called Sylvester in German, was an evening of parties, fireworks, and plenty of champagne. It had been a fine and safe occasion. (While assigned to the U.S. Consulate General in Stuttgart, the author went every year with friends to the Bismarckturm, a tower overlooking the city. He always had a clutch of skyrockets in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. The view was spectacular, the participants gleeful, and it was a wonder that the Swabian metropole didn’t burn to the ground.)

But, this year, things, just like Germany, changed—for the worse.

According to the Washington Post, “About 1,000 men described by officials as being largely of ‘Arab or North African origin’ [meaning migrants] had congregated in the square outside Cologne’s main train station that night [New Year’s Eve], with groups reportedly breaking off and assaulting women.” Continuing, the paper commented that women reported a sense of “lawlessness”. One woman told BBC News that “They grabbed our arms…pushed our clothes away and tried to get between our legs or I don’t know where.”

An observant German contact remarked that women had also been celebrating outside Cologne’s impressive cathedral. They tried to flee their attackers but, owing to the press of people, couldn’t. Besides being sexually molested, they had their cell phones and money stolen.

Our source added that Cologne’s Lord Mayor, Henriette Reker, who ran as an independent aligned with the leftist Green Party, had caused a massive outpouring of scorn and contempt, when she would not criticize the migrants. Instead, she advised women to keep an “arm’s length” from strange men. People wanted to know just what is an “arm’s length” and how can you keep an arm’s length away from anyone in a huge crowd. Reker, once a member of Merkel’s CDU party, had been elected from a hospital bed after an alleged throat-slashing by a man ostensibly opposed to migrants,. She is now the subject of mocking Facebook posts. One such came from a German Jew who shared a Junge Alternative fṻr Deutschland (youth group of the Alternative für Deutschland AfD) poster. (AfD is a right-wing party critical of the German Chancellor’s efforts to bring in one million migrants.) The picture (below) shows a woman sighting along the barrel of a large revolver held at arm’s length, with the caption We’ve checked it out, an arm’s length is security. Reker is right.

The Lord Mayor seems to be in denial. Reker, in a later public statement, said that the migrants didn’t come from asylee shelters in the city and that any reports of such were entirely unreliable. Her statement about her attack also seems unreliable. Her assailant used what looked like a bowie knife which should have proved fatal and which should have left a brutal scar—but didn’t, Indeed, the affair was so suspicious that several leftist members of the Bundestag (German parliament) requested an investigation into alleged long-standing ties the assailant had with German domestic intelligence.

The knife used on Reker

Cologne was not an anomaly.

German journalist, Manuel Ochsenreiter, posted a video of migrant assaults in Berlin, with the caption “This is not April/May 1945—this is New Year’s Eve.” The disquieting film clip showed Merkel’s “invitees”, her “children” firing strictly-controlled handguns in the air and loosing rockets and other explosive fireworks horizontally into the crowd which packed the streets. Fire trucks, which I had never seen in operation during my five years in Germany, were roaring through the streets, sirens howling.

In Hamburg, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported January 5 that the situation there resembled Cologne. Young women between the ages of 18 and 24 were verbally and sexually molested, then robbed of money and cell phones. The attackers, migrants in various-sized groups, surrounded the women who sought to flee the scene. The paper quoted Rainer Wendt, federal chairman of the German police union, as saying that the attacks weren’t organized. The migrants simply used the crowd, the darkness, and the shock effect for their actions.

Another interlocutor told us that there were Sylvester outbreaks in Stuttgart, on a smaller scale than Cologne, yet also with sexual gropings, robberies, and theft of cell phones. The Stuttgart attacks took place in the town square, the picturesque Schloßplatz, according to the FAZ. It added that two 18 year old females were set upon by a group of 15 men. The Stuttgarter Zeitung announced a second attack by a similar group wherein a 20 year old male migrant groped two girls, one 15, the other 18.

In Weil am Rhein, a town in the far southwest of Baden-Württemberg, four Syrians, including two asylum-seekers, between the ages of 14 and 21 raped two German girls, 14 and 15 years old. SWR (Southwest Radio), in reporting the New Year’s Eve crime, noted that the police downplayed any connection with the Cologne events and quoted the State Police and the State’s Attorney’s office as saying that a group of underage girls had willingly gone to the home of the underage boys and had engaged in “an exchange of tendernesses”, implying they had voluntarily participated in sex.

In Singen, in the south of Baden-Wurttemberg, the local paper wrote that, on the late afternoon of January 4, 2016, two dark-skinned men attacked and attempted to strip naked a 30-year old woman sitting on a park bench behind City Hall. She fought them off and they ran.

In Munich, principal city of relaxed Bavaria in Germany’s southeast, Rosenheim24, an online news service, reported that 10 to 15 men swarmed two women who were taking a cigarette break outside a disco at 2 a.m. One was groped and the other held fast. Both eventually broke free and fled into the disco.

The foregoing accounts may well be only the ones reported. There is a sense, according to some contacts, that the German federal government was pressing news outlets around the country to downplay the events of Sylvester 2015.

What’s the real background to this?

One German contact, who always voted Left, noted that police positions in the last few years had been cut. Additionally, others have suggested that the police simply didn’t exert themselves. News outlets commented that the Cologne police were slow to act but quick to hide their reasons for doing so. One individual we know asked why the police didn’t use water cannons on the 1,000 or so migrants attacking women. Yes, it was cold, but was there a quicker way to disperse those criminals?, she asked. She emphasized that the Cologne police routinely used water cannon to break up street protests and wondered how it was that the police “forgot” about their crowd-control weapon that night. Indeed, a quick check of the Internet showed that other cities in Germany, such as Hamburg and Leipzig, routinely employed them as well. In Stuttgart, in the Fall of 2010, according to another long-time contact, the police, under the direction of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, were plenty fast in using water cannon. They sprayed women, children, and pensioners in protests against redeveloping the city’s main railroad station. While the police were clearly slow, and, perhaps, unwilling to act in Cologne against migrants, it was another story when the German right mounted a massive demonstration against Merkel’s pro-asylum policy. The British newspaper, the Independent, reported January 9, 2016:

Water cannons and pepper spray have been used to push back more than a thousand anti-immigration protesters in Cologne as anger mounted in a demonstration following attacks on New Year’s Eve.

One knowledgeable source, from what was once Yugoslavia, asks how it was possible to coordinate thousands of migrant attacks on women all over Germany in towns both large and small (as well as in Austria and Finland).

The general feeling seems to be that it was synchronized and stage-managed just as the ISIL attacks in the Middle East are: with U.S. and European intelligence service cooperation. The earlier propaganda campaign in Germany in favor of the migrant wave is now morphing into a movement targeting opposition to that wave. The Good Man (Gutmensch) now opposes the Wutbürger (someone who is old, stubborn, and angry—Wut=Anger). Others might define the Wutbürger as someone fed up with political actions at the expense of the citizenry, such as the Stuttgarters who opposed the station redevelopment or those appalled at Merkel’s Migration of Peoples.

COMMENT: A social engineering pattern is beginning to emerge from the New Europe’s migrant travails. Just as in the United States, unrestricted immigration, legal and otherwise, is becoming a major political goal. Whether the refugees, from overseas political, economic, and military failures, are wanted or not, some governments require them. They’re a source of cheap labor, they can be exploited politically, and they can be used to divide the native population. Besides America, this occurred in what used to be Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. (cf. “Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World”.) It’s now taking place in Germany.

Remember the chief goal of the Roman and British Empires: divide et impera (divide and rule). That seems to hold true in the new America Empire (but without the benefits of the Pax Romana, with one administration, one law, one language for most of the known world).

A divided people, suspicious of groupings comprising it, can be more easily manipulated into accepting genetically-modified foods, Frankenfoods. They can be directed to move from one borderless region to another at the whim of the capitalists who need a workforce elsewhere.

With jobs moving from country to country, it is easier to control the workers. In the United States, companies first moved from the industrial cities of the Northeast to the South because wages were lower there. Then, they moved to Mexico, China, and India, where people were grateful for a pittance. Now, whether it’s a humidifier, television set, or customer service, the companies in control have “outsourced” their employment. It’s no joke in the U.S. that employment is so insecure that a family is only two paychecks away from living on the street.

This looks like what Angela Merkel and the corporations supporting mass migration to Germany would like to have in Europe. And, from events over the past year, with migrants shouting they are her children, it will likely happen. The Gutmensch is clearly superior to the Wutbürger by design.

Whether the mood will change, whether the asylum law will alter, whether the German government will adjust its attitude, as both a good contact and the newspaper, Die Welt suggest, is happening remains to be seen. Time will tell.

It’s obvious: imaginary terrorists. Americans, once hard-headed realists, now seem to be the driving force behind bogeymen under every bed. And, it appears, they have sold this climate of fear to the once very rational, very hard-headed Europeans.

On December 31, 2015, RT, the international news channel, reported that the French and the Belgians had canceled New Year’s celebrations in Paris and Brussels—because of supposed threats of terrorist attacks. RT added that Munich had closed two railroad stations since there were also reports of possible extremist incidents. (Munich’s response, according to the Washington Post of January 1, 20016, came after being “tipped off by a[n unidentified] foreign intelligence service”—Israel’s?). The Post added that authorities closed Moscow’s Red Square on New Year’s Eve. The paper implied terrorist threats caused this, a statement disputed by a former Russian government official. A Belgian contact noted that the streets of Brussels are still full of soldiers, the police are searching houses in Molenbeek, an Arab and Muslim area of the city, the restaurants are only half full, and the transport system in the capital shut down at 10 p.m. on December 31. She said the entire populace is now afraid.

Suspicious people might wonder at this. Following the August 21, 2015 incident aboard the Thalys express train, RT announced September 18, 2015, an unarmed, unidentified man had locked himself in a toilet aboard the Thalys, claiming he had a bomb. Police evacuated the train along with seven platforms in Rotterdam. What’s so interesting about the first event was that it was providently foiled by two American soldiers (one just back from Afghanistan) and a Briton, alleged to have a military contractor background. (His partner, we’re told, runs EU train security.) They just happened to be traveling on a luxury train running through Germany, Belgium, Holland, and France when a Moroccan came out of the toilet carrying an AK-47.

Were the Thalys incidents a test-drive for the politics of fear?

The attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015 sure helped. They followed the January 15, 2015 gunfire at the alleged satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in reality, an anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic rag. But, the shoot-out helped build a worldwide climate of hatred and fear of Muslims.

What appears to be the basis for a rising tide of hatred and fear is the rising tide of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries. According to a German contact, they’ve even reached Süßen, a small town of some 10,000 people 45 km. (ca. 27 miles) east of Stuttgart. The municipality is housing them in a sports-hall, she said.

According to Deutsche Welle (Germany’s international broadcaster), Czech President Miloš Zeman has compared the refugees arriving in Europe to a Trojan horse. He called the influx an “organized invasion.” The news service continued, quoting from Zeman’s December 24 Christmas message, that [he] “warned against welcoming asylum seekers and described the European culture of hospitality as naïve.” The Czech President added “I am profoundly convinced that we are [not] facing…a spontaneous movement of refugees.” Zeman, elected head of state in early 2013, further noted “A large majority of the illegal migrants are young men in good health, and single. I wonder why these men are not taking up arms to go fight for the freedom of their countries against the Islamic State”.

Zeman was not alone in castigating this Migration of Peoples, die Vőlkerwanderung.

Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister, described the refugees entering Europe as “looking like an army”. Quoted in the Guardian, as speaking at a gathering of conservative parties from across the Continent, Orbán said: “What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters. This is an uncontrolled and unregulated process.” Continuing, he added, “[The] Right to human dignity and security are basic rights. But neither the German nor the Hungarian way of life is a basic right of all people on the Earth.”

According to EurActiv.com, a summit of the “Visegrad Four” countries – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland– held in Prague on September 4, 2015, rejected mandatory quotas for taking refugees, but said the group wanted to contribute to tackling the crisis and protect the Schengen border-free zone. (The 1985 Schengen, Luxemburg agreement guaranteed free movement of people within most of the EU.) Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz claimed refugee quotas would attract further migrants to the EU. Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, who chaired the meeting, asserted discussions about refugee quotas did not go to the point. The core of the problem is the EU incapability to regulate migration and the situation in the countries like Syria and Libya, he argued. “We agreed that the debate on quotas has only one purpose. It diverts attention from the real core of the problem. Europe [has] lost [the] capability to regulate migration,” Sobotka said.

And it’s not just the smaller states of Europe who speak out against this Vőlkerwanderung.

According to CNN, Russian President Vladimir Putin “…point[s] the finger at Europe and the United States for what has now become one of the biggest mass migrations of people in modern times.” Putin further noted “…[in] talking to reporters Friday [September 4, 2015], it’s the West’s wrong-headed foreign policy in the Middle East and Northern Africa that’s at the root of the crisis.”

CNN added, “Putin, speaking to the Russian news agency TASS, said he warned the West about the possible consequences of its Mideast and Africa policy several years ago. ‘What is this policy about? This is imposing its standards without taking into consideration historic, religious, national and cultural specifics of these regions,’ Putin told…TASS at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. ‘This is first of all, the policy of our American partners. I am looking with surprise at certain American mass media now criticizing Europe for an excessively tough, as they believe, treatment of migrants,’ Putin added.” Europe is “blindly following U.S. instructions” and suffering greatly, he said.

Well, just how did this supposed spontaneous migration come to Europe? We could suggest that this is similar to the mujahideen migrating to Afghanistan to change the attitude of the Soviet Union. Besides recruiting terrorists and “migrants” in Saudi Arabia, using American consular offices in Dhahran, Jeddah, and Riyadh, there were 52 hiring offices in the United States, including one in Washington, D.C. Overseen by the al-Farukh mosque in Brooklyn (with the aid of the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a CIA recruit), the various bureaus transferred money as well as recruits abroad. Who’s to say these organizations were never shut down? Who’s to say these organizations were never expanded? Who’s to say these organizations don’t operate in the Middle East and South Asia?

Sheikh Abdullah Anas, son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, the tutor to Osama bin Laden, might be able to tell us. But, he doesn’t talk, perhaps for fear of jeopardizing his asylee status in Great Britain—and possibly harming his opportunity for emigrating to the United States.

But, what’s going to become of all this? As one astute analyst of the European scene noted:

Immigration and integration politics, and confrontations with Muslim conservatives over education, women’s rights, and the relationship between the state and religion are likely to strengthen right-of-center political organizations and splinter the left-of-center political coalitions that were instrumental in building it.

And what will this lead to? As that observer sagely added:

Germany’s national security is on the verge of collapse… [Expect] militarization of Germany in domestic and international domains as a result of this crisis and respective changes in German and anticipated EU changes in laws… [Look for] restriction of freedom of speech and hate speech laws, No-Go Zones, strictly enforced protest zones…. Europe moves to the political right in fear and attempted public self-defense, uncomfortably far to the right……[As the result of] the groups, individuals and motives behind the entire manufactured mass migration crisis…

In other words, fear.

COMMENT: Instead of investigating this man-made crisis, instead of holding people to account for their actions, governments and news media, even long-established ones with capable journalists, parrot phrases about the need to help the unfortunates. The unfortunates are certainly not going to help the peoples and their governments. And it’s likely too late for any effective action. Look at the United States and its 20 million (if not more) illegal aliens. Every time a politician complains about what they’ve done to the country’s culture, the Left shouts him down as a racist who wants to send productive people back to failed states with repressive governments. The same situation obtains in Europe: the Good Man, the Gutmensch, welcomes the illegals fleeing war and devastation. (But neglect to say that the United States and its repressive allies in the region have created this chaos.)

Throughout most of Israel’s existence, it has mounted terrorist attacks on United States government property and United States citizens. Here are some examples:

• EGYPT. On July 14, 1954, Israeli intelligence officials exploded fire bombs at U.S. Information Service libraries and U.S. Consulate offices in Cairo and Alexandria. The object was to poison relations between the United States and Egypt by depicting Muslims as being responsible. The Egyptian government caught and tried a number of Egyptian Jews involved in the attacks. Eventually, due to great outcry, Pinhas Lavon, Israeli Defense Minister resigned.

• U.S.S. LIBERTY Eastern Mediterranean . On June 8,1967, after nine hours of regular reconnaissance of the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence ship, Israeli armed forces, with full knowledge of the Liberty’s nationality, attacked the vessel without warning. The Liberty, steaming in international waters, suffered 34 Americans murdered, 174 maliciously wounded out of the ship’s 294-man complement. The $40 million ship was deemed unsalvageable and sold for scrap.

• RACHEL CORRIE–Rafah, Palestine. On March 16, 2003, an Israeli soldier drove a 54-ton Caterpillar bulldozer over the 23-year old U.S. citizen—twice–crushing her skull, chest, and spine. She had been attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family from being demolished. The peace activist, wearing a blaze orange jacket with reflective stripes, was clearly visible to the soldier driving the equipment. While her parents were attempting to seek justice for the murder of their daughter, an Israeli military leader told the Haifa court that “During war there are no civilians.” As part of a policy that is still in effect, the Israeli military and police do not investigate complaints of attacks against civilians in “closed military zones.”

• MAVI MARMARA, Eastern Mediterranean. On May 31, 2010, Israeli armed forces stormed the six ships of the Palestine aid flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement, an activist organization with members from numerous countries. During the assault in international waters, Zionist commandos murdered nine people, including U.S. citizen Fulkan Dogan—shot five times in the head, legs, and back. The Israelis then falsely imprisoned 629 activists from the ships, including former U.S. ambassador Edward L. Peck.

• EMILY HENOCHOWICZ—Qalandia Checkpoint, Palestine. On May 31, 2010, Israeli soldiers blinded the 21-year-old U.S. artist, activist, and Jew. She had been standing at the front of a demonstration protesting the Mavi Marmara attack. She was waving a Turkish flag, when soldiers deliberately fired a tear-gas canister at her face, putting out an eye and breaking her jaw and cheekbone.

Debtor

Israel’s existence depends on massive U.S. transfers of its citizen’s money, along with tax-free handovers of funds to alleged Zionist charities. This fuels Israel’s war machine. Profits from the sales of Israeli products in the United States often go to colonists occupying Palestinian lands (and using their resources) or to units of the Israeli “Defense” Force.

Because of this, Israeli citizens have Universal Health Care while American citizens don’t.
Here are the highlights:

• Total U.S. aid to Israel since 1949 exceeds $138 billion.

• Military aid: $3 billion annually since 2007. Twenty-five percent of this can be spent on Israeli-manufactured weapons and military equipment, which are then exported for Israel’s profit.

• Israel also receives loan guarantees and free or reduced cost military equipment from the United States. Israel gets funding from American Defense Department appropriations for projects such as its Iron Dome missile shield. (The U.S. Congress has forgiven all past loans to Israel.)

• More than $1.5 billion in private U.S. funds go to Israel annually in the form of $1 billion in private tax-deductible donations and $500 million in purchases of Israeli bonds.

• Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world’s population and already has one of the world’s higher per capita incomes. With that being about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than oil-rich Saudi Arabia and are only slightly less well-off than most Western European countries.

• Buying products like Sabra hummus and Sodastream helps fund Israel’s military control over Palestinians. Some companies have factories located in one of the 125 officially recognized colonies in occupied Palestine, which are illegal under international law. Other companies contribute to the maintenance of the occupation through cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose main goal is to protect illegal “settlements” and exercise dominion over the lives of millions of Palestinians.

• Sabra hummus is partly owned by an Israeli company named the Strauss Group. It gives an elite IDF unit, the Golani Brigade, a variety of food products for their training or missions, and provides personal care packages for each soldier. (The Golani Brigade played a key role in the Israeli army’s assault on the Gaza Strip in 2008-09 during “Operation Cast Lead”. That action was infamous for its murders, war crimes, and human rights violations against Palestinians.)

• Tribe hummus and Ahava beauty products all have ties to the Israeli government. Tribe uses its U.S. profits to help that government strip Palestinians of their land and keep them from leasing it back. Ahava is 37% owned by Hamashbir Holdings, tied to the Orad Group, producing electronic detection systems for use on the West Bank separation barrier.

CONCLUSION: In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, they note that “When Israel was founded, in 1948, U.S. policy makers did not consider it a strategic asset…American policy makers recognized that embracing Israel too closely would undermine the U.S. position elsewhere in the Middle East. President Truman’s decision to support the UN partition plan and to recognize Israel was based [in part] on…an awareness that recognition was backed by many American Jews and would therefore yield domestic political benefits.”

To date, the only benefits yielded in the close relationship between the United States and Israel have been to Israel’s advantage. It appears as if only detriments have come to the United States, its citizens, and to the Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East.

But what of the future?

Considering the steady rightward drift of the Israeli government, its focus on Greater Israel, and its oppression of Palestinians and others, can we consider the ruling elites there to be stable? If they are not, should the United States continue to transfer such large sums of money to them, funding Israeli wars and state-sponsored terrorism?

Does America have any responsibility for Israel’s actions? If so, whose is it? Our political leadership? The average voter? The Religious Right? The Mainstream Media for only telling part of the story?

Since Israel possesses an unknown number of weapons of mass destruction, what happens if one or two “go missing”? Suppose some carefully-cultivated fanatics acquire and detonate a stray bomb or two? Will there be a finger-pointing tarantella or general war?